Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Moving from European Discourses on the Precarious and Art to the Realities of Contemporary Dance

Abstract

In this article, we encapsulate several key debates in sociology, cultural and arts politics and the media industry on precarious work since its emergence at the turn of the twenty-first century. After setting out the fundamental discourses on precarity, we concentrate on contemporary dance artists as precarious workers and investigate the extent to which different levels of precarity affect them, distinguishing relevant aspects related to socio-economic, mental and physical precarity. We propose that the nature of their work is integrally connected with the ‘precarious’. To close, we conclude that protest against precarity itself is of a precarious nature.